Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2) in The Year of Reading Proust

Nov 22, 2008 Manny rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, linguistics-and-philosophy, life-is-proust, what-i-do-for-a-living, french, fun-with-lara

[Original review of print edition]

There's a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A la recherche du temps perdu, and people see different things in it. To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust's analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann. There, he examined one particular kind of relationship. Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him more often. Without realizing it ...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Karen· rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mttbr-2013, 2013-year-of-reading-proust

WHY?

Or: The Brain on Proust

There’s a group of 7 ladies I’ve known for quite some time. We meet regularly for afternoon tea, going round turn and turn about, although Barbara has now been excused from hosting in deference to her great seniority and some health issues that come along with the seniority. We have nothing in common except that we are all English native speakers, living here in Germany, and all of us married at one time or another to German husbands. So it’s only the language that con ...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Madeleine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: there-s-no-i-in-group-read, blogophilia, our-libeary, maybe-it-s-time-to-live, 2013, head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book

Oh, adolescence. Is there any period of time more frustrating, conflicting and downright disappointing than that too-long span of gawky limbs and endless opportunities for embarrassment? When one's body is alien territory, when one is faced with an onslaught of wholly unfamiliar impulses, when the head and the heart and all of the hormones are battling for control over a vessel that just wants things to make the kind of black-and-white sense they did in the blissfully naive days that are just ou Oh, adolescence. Is there any period of time more frustrating, conflicting and downright disappointing than that too-long span of gawky limbs and endless opportunities for embarrassment? When one's body is alien territory, when one is faced with an onslaught of wholly unfamiliar impulses, when the head and the heart and all of the hormones are battling for control over a vessel that just wants things to make the kind of black-and-white sense they did in the blissfully naive days that are just out of arm's reach but already rapidly fading memories, constantly pushed farther and farther away by the systematic remapping of a formerly recognizable world.

Both Proust's narrator -- still imbued with vestiges of an innocence that can only take root in a childhood shaped by terminal sensitivity -- and his vulnerable heart stumble cautiously and cluelessly beyond youth's idyllic safety zone into the uncharted realm of life after puberty: He is, indeed, alone in the umbra cast by blossoming young girls who have gained his affections but will not share the warmth of their vernal lights with him. One of Proust's most obvious successes with this volume is the familiar poignancy he gives to the fumbling initial efforts of gaining another young heart's favor because, really, did any of us understand the objects of our blindly obsessive desires at that age? Reading this book was like going through all those terrible milestones all over again, only with each misstep beautifully rendered and every confused failure examined with an enviably erudite melancholy that still captures the fatalistic immediacy of all those awful lessons' first cuts.

From the beginning, his understanding that the world he had not long ago regarded with a child's certainty was now turned on its head was apparent, as the feverishly anticipated chance to see his favorite actress results in the kind of shattering disappointment specially reserved for those times when an impossibly idealized dream becomes a vapid reality. This is only the first in a series of crushing blows, though: The narrator's dreams of literary greatness are effectively dismantled by his father's colleague; a beloved writer has little in common with the literary persona he has come to adore; his first taste of love sours with his beloved's cooling interest and cruel neglect; the church at Balbec simply does not live up to his expectations.

But the necessary dethroning of old favorites and the tarnishing of long-upheld ideals make way for the man the narrator is to become, just as childhood's magic sooner or later drains from all those things that once so enthralled our younger selves. It is imperative that the narrator grow tired of such things so he can make new discoveries: His happiness is no longer derived solely from the sensory delights of a delicious feast, the beauty of nature, his mother's love, the wonder of the arts -- though the echoes of these things do reach the core of his soul to move him with their familiar stirrings of joy when they prove to be at their most resplendent moments. With age comes discrimination: As one can no longer live in a constant state of marvel distracting him from the myriad things to be discovered both within and without him, he also must learn what is truly worth his awed regard.

Like all teenagers, the narrator gradually distances himself from his family, focusing on the friendships and infatuations that define life on the brink of adulthood. And, like every teenager I ever knew, some of those friendships are based on convenience rather than a mutual affinity for each other's company. The deepening bond between the narrator and Robert serves as a beautiful foil for the narrator's desperate attempts to tally the redeeming qualities within Bloch, a back-home chum whose coarse manner and general inability to recognize his own countless flaws make his presence difficult to bear even at a reader's safe distance. The two dueling personalities embody the narrator's own wavering balance between youthful indiscretion and the discrimination of experience, highlighting the decay of the former as it becomes unreasonable to cling to such childishness to any longer. Just as not every girl the narrator fancies will return his interest, he no longer has to subscribe to the youthful notion that he ought to be friends with everyone.

Proust's writing is the real star of the show here, with a sumptuous language that just drips poetry from each page. His insights prove time and again that human nature is constant across the ages, even though people themselves are in constant states of adapting to both interior and exterior forces. What I found the most remarkable, though, was the way he takes the tired tradition of similes to positively novel heights by playing two almost diametrically opposing elements against each other to fully express the emotional resonance of a seemingly insignificant moment: A household cook's reverence for her cuisine is likened to Michelangelo's dedication to his art; the fading hope of restoring a broken relationship is akin to the panicked desperation of a wounded man who has drunk his last vial of morphine; "[j]ust as the priests with the broadest knowledge of the heart are those who can best forgive the sins they themselves never commit, so the genius with the broadest acquaintance with the mind can best understand ideas most foreign to those that fill his own works." They take what could be bloated ravings exaggerated to the point of nonsense and translate them into a personal relevance that paints a more accurately vivid representation of a personality than bland narration ever could.

This is people-watching at its finest, a tour of humanity with an unusually tender soul leading the way through his own emergence into adulthood and his discovery of the world around him. ...more

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Feb 12, 2008 Inderjit Sanghera rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

‘In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower’, is the second volume of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. As a novel, it is in many ways split into two separate parts; the first part ‘At Madame Swann’s’ dispenses with the poetry of the earlier volume and decides to concentrate on the psychological themes which permeate Proust’s work; the second half, ‘Place Names: the place’ marks the return of Proust’s concerns with the natural world as he finally gets to visit Balbec, the seaside resort which he h ‘In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower’, is the second volume of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. As a novel, it is in many ways split into two separate parts; the first part ‘At Madame Swann’s’ dispenses with the poetry of the earlier volume and decides to concentrate on the psychological themes which permeate Proust’s work; the second half, ‘Place Names: the place’ marks the return of Proust’s concerns with the natural world as he finally gets to visit Balbec, the seaside resort which he had spent most of his childhood fantasising about seeing and forms the best of Proust’s writing as he coalesces his psychological concerns with his ethereal observations on nature. They also introduce us to the three most important characters in the novel: the Baron de Charlus, Albertine and the Marquise de Saint-Loup, as well as the painter, Elstir
Indeed, it is via Elstir, who is a kind of composite of various naturalist painters, that Marcel begins to discover and create his aesthetic sense. Elstir teaches Marcel that beauty lies not in the object, but in the contemplation of the object and the translation of this into art-just as Monet was able to open our eyes to the ethereal and altogether ephemeral beauty of haystacks in the sunlight, so Elstir is able to open Marcel’s eyes to the gossamer like beauty of a sunset, glowing with an endless variety of harlequin colours, or even the altogether more quotidian beauty of a recently cleared dinner table;

“Since seeing such things in the water-colours of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the bell-tent of a used napkin, within which the sun secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, by glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, from green to blue, blue to gold…I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary of things, in the profound ‘still of life’.”

Marcel’s mind is now ebullient with the beauty of the everyday, however Elstir has a more profound truth to teach Marcel; “Wisdom cannot be inherited-one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course which no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare you that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things.” A constant theme throughout the novels is that Marcel is unable to realise his dream of becoming a great writer-both because he believes he lacks the talent to become one and also because he feels he lacks the proper subject. It is via Elstir that Marcel realises that the subject for his art is life itself and that the constant mistakes and pitfalls he falls into whilst creating his work of art have only served to enhance the profundity of his work, because they are wisdoms he has discovered himself. The utilitarian view of art propagated by Norpois, who is contemptuous both of Marcel’s favourite author, Bergotte and of Marcel’s delightful little vignette on the steeples of Combray, is ultimately sterile and worthless because it propagates platitudes discovered by others, rather than truths discovered by oneself.
Proust felt it was hard for people to process artistic originality because it contradicted what they believed (via art) life to be like. However, once a piece of art becomes accepted and mainstream, it ceases to be original and becomes part of the status quo; thus for Marcel great art is merely the translation of the endless amount of human experiences. The artistic movement known as impressionism, which for so long was ridiculed by the public and critics, had gained acceptance by the time Proust had become an adult (as reflected in the enhanced reputation of Elstir by the time Marcel had reached adulthood) and the principles of the movement play an important role within In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The broad brush strokes of impressionism form Marcel’s view of the natural world, from its obsession with nature, to the play of light on a leaf or the bloom of a flower, the impressionists were concerned with how our brains process the fleeting beauty of the world; how our eyes see the sunset as red because that is how our brains have been trained to perceived sunset, when in fact a sunset contains all manner of fleeting and fabulous colours which our initial impressions may discern, but our “rational” senses eventually take over and transform the rainbow of sunset into a drab russet;

“The fact that it was Elstir’s intent, now to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions which our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been the first to uncover them.”
As a result, Proust’s prose picks up all the visual nuances of the world, the hidden images behind the “reality” of things, the secret of the world behind the integument created by our minds;
“Fancying that Baudelaire’s lines about ‘lounging on the esplanade’ or ‘in the boudoir’ applied to me, I was wondering whether his ‘sunbeams gleaming on the sea’-unlike the evening sunbeam, simple and shallow, a tremulous golden shaft-might not be those I could see at that very moment burnishing the surfaces of the waves to topaz, fermenting it to a pale, milky beer, frothing it like milk, while every now and again great blue shadows passed over parts of it, as though high above us a god was having fun moving a mirror about”
The trickery and mirages of nature and the way we perceive the world are not the only illusions, or disillusionments, which the narrator discovers within the novel. Marcel goes through repeated artistic disillusionments, firstly from him finally being able to see La Berma, to then meeting his literary hero, Bergotte and afterwards meeting the great artist, Elstir. In the case of La Berma and Bergotte, he realises that the reality didn’t live up to the pleasures he had imagined in finally seeing La Berma and meeting Bergotte; instead all he got was the disappointment in realising that La Berma’s performance in reality wasn’t the euphoric experience he imagine it to be and Bergotte wasn’t the man he imagined him to be-this conflict between reality and the imagination is central to Proust’s work, for Proust there would always be a disconnect between the two because our imagination is purely an internal process, whereas reality is something which exists externally to ourselves, but which we are always attempting to correlate with how we imagine the world to be-yet Proust’s solution to this is; 'If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.” This is coupled with the fact that now that the narrator has finally gained entry into an artistic milieu, he chooses to forgo the company of Elstir and Bergotte in the favour of Gilberte or the straggle of young girls, including Albertine, who so captivate his imagination. Although Bergotte and Elstir are able to open the door to the narrator’s aesthetic senses, it is the narrators’ experiences, no matter how banal or profound, which form the basis of his art.

And what an art the narrator is able to mould out of the raw materials of his life! Just as the painter is able to create something magical and beautiful out of paint and canvas, so the narrator is able to describe the world in wholly original ways;

“it was just a part of its surroundings, with an accidental look to it, as though it was a detail of a late afternoon in which the dome against the sky had the mellow swell of a fruit ripening its golden pink in the same sunshine as touched the chimneys of the houses.”
“At that late morning moment, when rays of sunlight came in form more than one aspect and seemingly from other times of the day, breaking the angles of the walls, setting side by side on the chest of draws a reflection from the beach and wayside altar of colours as variegated as flowers along a lane, alighting brightly on the wainscot with the tremble of folded wings ready to fly away, warming like bath-water a country mat by the little courtyard window, which the sunshine festooned like a vine, adding the charm and decorative complexity of the furnishings by seeming to peel away he flowered silks of armchairs and unpick their braidings, that room where I loitered for a moment before dressing for our outing was a prism in which the colours of the light from the outside were dispersed, a hive in which all the heady nectars of the day awaiting me were still separate and ungathered but already visible, a garden of hopes shimmering with silver and rose petals.”

The narrator’s theories and experience of love also develop-firstly the touching scenes between the narrator and his grandmother, the scene in which she awaits his knocking in the morning is truly beautiful-yet this being Proust, things are rarely what they seem and Proust’s nuanced characterisations demonstrate that although the narrator feels a deep love for his grandmother, it isn’t without an element of shallowness or cruelty, as when he mocks her for wanting to take a photo for Saint-Loup. Secondly comes the development of romantic love, in the first part of the book, the narrator realises that falling in love is more an act of self-gratification; all love is a form of self-love and every time we fall in love we are merely falling in love with the same image clothed in different people over and over again. So the narrator’s bizarre and obsessive love for Gilberte, is destined to be repeated over and over again; firstly via a set of incidental peasant girls and milk maids and then via a gaggle of young girls he encounters on the beach in Balbec and finally on Albertine. And what wonderful images and metaphors he is able to conjure up out of his bottomless hat in regards to Albertine;

“All the way back to Balbec, the image of Albertine, flooded by the glow form other girls, was not the only one I could see. But just as the moon, after spending the daylight hours in the guise of a white cloudlet, more shaped and more stable than others, begins to come into its own as daylight fades, so by the time I was back in the hotel, it was Albertine’s image which rose to shine unrivalled above the horizon of my heart.”
“Her cheeks often looked pale; but seen from the side, as I could see them now, they were suffused and brightened with blood which gave them the glow of those brisk winter mornings when, out for a walk, we see stone touched and ruddied by the sun, looking like pink granite and filling us with joy”
Imagine the artistic euphoria, when you first begin reading Proust, the sunshine of his prose lighting up your eyes and mind! Like the impressionists, Proust was an artist of euphoria; he was able to catch life from new and innovative perspectives like Manet, like Monet he captured the variance of light on different objects, like Renoir he painted intimate and inimitable portraits of beautiful women, he shared Cézanne’s obsession with depth and dimensions and Degas’s obsession with movement and, as we will see later on, his interest in the seedier elements of Parisian society. Proust is the ultimate literary impressionist. ...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Marieke rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, 2013, audiobooks, french-lit, proustiana

Patience is a virtue. I've fallen behind the Proust 2013 schedule, but I will not rush this. I'm doing a combination audio and paper reading of this and enjoying it immensely. I'm pretty sure i will be rereading all the volumes repeatedly...ISOLT might be my desert island book. ...more

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Mar 14, 2013 David Cerruti rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Five stars, of course.
I liked In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower even more than Swann’s Way. It looks like other Goodreaders also liked it, as the table below shows.

The attrition rate is remarkable. Volume 1 got more ratings than all other volumes combined.

And now, on to The Guermantes Way. Will I finish all seven volumes, or fade away like the majority? I want to finish. We shall see.
...more

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Oct 21, 2012 Casey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-serious-lit, all-around-the-world, 1001-books, dear-ones, curmudgeon-canon, books-that-can-double-as-weapons

“On the whole I had derived very little benefit from Balbec, but this only strengthened my desire to return there.”

Proust sums up the book better than I can: not much happens during Within a Budding Grove, and I can’t wait to see what doesn’t happen next. It’s difficult to talk about Proust, partly because there’s not much of a plot to In Search of Lost Time (at least, in the traditional sense), partly because Proust is much more eloquent than I am. Initially, I wanted to describe what happened ...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Will rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Oh our young narrator, how he loves the little girls, how he loves the pretty little girls to distraction.

Notable difference in translation quality coming from Lydia Davis's poetic rendering of Swann's Way moving into this edited and re-edited translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright. You can't take the life out of Proust, though, I love getting wrapped up in the rhythm of his sentences, the words ebb and flow like the Balbec coast where our young narrator "suns h ...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Jamie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2013

It's a wonderful novel. I'll confess - don't be displeased with me!!! will my snob privilege be revoked??? - that I found this less breathtaking & less fascinating, largely because, in many ways, it felt as if we were watching the Swann/Odette affair, and its beautiful psychological and affective intricacies, play out with different characters. It didn't surprise me; it didn't necessarily innovate. And so much of the charm of the first book, particularly with the narrator's childhood & Proust's ...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Caroline rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"Loving sharpens discernment and our power to make distinctions. In a wood, a bird-watcher's ear will instantly pick out the chirps and warbles peculiar to different species that the uninstructed cannot tell apart. The fancier of young girls knows that human voices are even more varied...." (486) ...more

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